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Former Luzerne County President Judge Michael T. Conahan moved one step closer to a federal prison cell this morning with his guilty plea to a racketeering conspiracy charge in U.S. District Court in Scranton.

Conahan withdrew a previous guilty plea last summer after U.S. District Judge Edwin M. Kosik judge rejected the 87-month jail term spelled out in his plea agreement. That agreement allowed him to back out if he was dissatisfied with his sentence.

His new agreement with prosecutors, signed in April, has no escape clause and Conahan will face up to 20 years when he is sentenced by Kosik, who accepted his guilty plea today.

The new agreement also lacks any indication of whether Conahan will testify against his co-defendant, former judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. or cooperate with federal investigators conducting an ongoing corruption probe that has ensnared 27 local government officials and contractors since January 2009.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office and Conahan’s attorney, Philip Gelso, have declined comment on what cooperation, if any, he will offer government prosecutors.

Conahan, 58, and Ciavarella, 60, were charged in January 2009 with accepting $2.8 million from the builder and owner of a for-profit detention center that housed county juveniles.

Prosecutors say Conahan, as president judge, closed a county-owned center and signed a secret agreement to utilize the for-profit center while Ciavarella, as juvenile court judge, ensured a steady flow of detainees.

After the former judges withdrew their guilty pleas in August 2009, they were indicted by a federal grand jury on 48 counts that carry combined maximum sentences of hundreds of years in prison.

Conahan agreed to plead guilty to a single racketeering conspiracy count, but his plea hearing was delayed until today because of expected U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the constitutionality of one of the charges against the former judges, honest services fraud.

The Supreme Court ruled last month that the honest services fraud statute, aimed at government and corporate officials who defraud taxpayers and shareholders, is constitutional, but only in cases in which those officials receive bribes or kickbacks.

The prosecution and defense in the Conahan case have declined comment on how the court’s rulings might affect the former judge’s sentencing.

But Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, who wrote the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act under which Conahan was charged, said the rulings will have no effect because the honest services fraud charges against Conahan are based on the payment of bribes.

“They fall within the definition of what the Supreme Court approved,” said Blakey, who drafted the RICO legislation while working as chief counsel to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in the 1970s.

RICO allows prosecutors to bundle crimes committed by members of a group and show a pattern of wrongdoing when presenting a case to a jury. In the case of the racketeering conspiracy charge against Conahan, those crimes include bribery, extortion and honest services fraud.

Conahan, a native of Hazleton, served 16 years as a magisterial district judge before his election to the county bench in 1993. He served as president judge from 2002 through 2006.
Conahan retired in January 2008, but was active as a senior judge presiding over a drug treatment court until January 2009, when the state Supreme Court relieved him of all judicial duties following his arrest. His plea agreement required him to surrender his license to practice law.

djanoski@citizensvoice.com, 570-301-2178

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